lirazel | (no subject)

Warning: these thoughts are very preliminary and more coming from a place of instinct than well-formed thought. I am happy for anyone to push back against anything I say provided you do it respectfully.

Hannah and I were talking yesterday (in a very un-nuanced way) about how weird it is that within fandom circles, there are fewer and fewer people willing to engage in commenting/meta-writing/actual fannish conversation (or hell, even reblogging of art on Tumblr), but more and more people who think nothing of paying for online stuff? I am shocked that this ko-fi thing has taken off--I guess I'm old school enough that the thought of monetizing fandom is horrifying to me.

I mean, I guess there's an entire cohort of people who never used the internet before Facebook introduced the like button and so don't know the joy of full-on fannish engagement. And those same people are accepting the commodification of...everything.

It's just really, really weird to see. I know there was a gap in culture between the pre-internet 'zine-and-conventions fans and then the very first fans who were using the internet before the world wide web and then again my generation who started using it in the late 90s and came up on message boards and mailing lists and such. But the gap between those earlier generation of fans (and by generation, I'm very much talking about "when you got involved in fandom," not what age you are) and the current one seems like a chasm. I just don't recognize how they do fandom, and I am actually pretty sad that none of them seem to want to do it the way we do it (only, you know, with greater diversity, etc. I'm not pretending like the internet in 2001 was perfect. It was much whiter and richer, and lots of things about accessibility have changed for the better since then).

I've just always really loved that fandom is a gift economy and that the gifts go both ways. That I write fic because I want to share it with y'all, and y'all respond and engage with it, and we all have a great time together. A "content"-based view of fandom where you just ~consume~ is just so repugnant to me and I don't want anything to do with it, and I know we're not going back to a livejournal kind of fannish experience, but I'm just...really not looking forward to further changes in fandom. I don't see good developments coming down the road, and I can't figure out if this is me being all Old Man Yells at Clouds or if I'm right and things just aren't as fun anymore.

And yes, this is partially about me getting fewer comments when I write fic for a huge fandom than when I write for a Yuletide-sized fandom, but also it's about a general feeling that people just don't view fandom (or even the whole internet) as a place of two-way interaction anymore.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I mean what's long ago in fandom years I've been using it for ages but that does help me explain why people don't use it or why people seem to me to be willfully misinterpreting boom.arks

Huh. I don't see the willful misunderstanding? The old fic archives I was on back in the early 2000s had interchangeable bookmark/favorites features, and if they were public, I always assumed they were for marking your favorites, and if they were private, they were just for you. Other people may have used them differently, but the way I always used, say, ff.net (not the only fic site I used, but obviously the most cross-fandom one) was to go through the fandom till I found a fic I liked, then read that author's favorites, then read the favorites of those authors, etc. etc. That was literally how I found any good fic at all in a given fandom.

I took that experience to AO3 and I do the same thing, and it has served me well. That's just...how I find things that are worth my time on big sites. Find my favorites' favorites.

If there's a mark for later function and bookmark function (as there was when I started using the site so long ago), it seemed to me that one was for my personal use and one was for public use.

However, the recommendation function does complicate all of that, because now there are three ways to mark a fic. If you use the mark for later as it's intended to be used, and then you use the rec feature as it's intended to be used, then...what is just a regular bookmark with no rec for? It certainly becomes confusing!

Or maybe it's all purposefully designed to let people have multiple options for each different kind of "marking."

[eta] I'm getting the feeling that you're mad at me, and I'm not sure why? Did I imply that you shouldn't use the site the way you want to use it? If so, I apologize--that was not my intention and I should have written more carefully. I feel no judgment about it. It just honestly hadn't occurred to me until the past few weeks (when I saw a similar discussion on Tumblr) that people use it differently than I do. I was just trying to explain my reasoning.

Edited 2022-10-04 22:49 (UTC)

I'm not mad at anybody, it's just having people say 'oh that person bookmarked a fic but didn't kudo it, how rude' or 'people are private bookmarking things they must be up to something sneaky' makes me just not want to interact with things at all.

Ah, I see! I haven't seen those discussions, but yeah, that would be frustrating and alienating. It definitely seems like people are using these things in ways that are at cross-purposes, then making assumptions (as I have!) about how others are using them. I'm really glad to have learned that other people use them different so that I know not to make those assumptions.

I mean it was literally on this post "do you get private bookmarks?" implying that people are doing it for nefarious purposes.

I really didn't interpret it that way at all, though I see what you're saying now that you point it out. Like I said--I didn't know that you could see that people had privately bookmarked your fics until that question was asked. But yes, you're right: that does absolutely seem like a case of making an assumption that everyone uses the functions the same way and thus judging people's motives ignorantly.

i'm so confused now, i must have misread everything in this thread. never mind me.

Quite possibly you didn't and I was the one who misread! (Literally last night my sister sent me a screenshot of a text from one of her friends and was like, "Can you believe she said this?" And I...didn't really see anything wrong with the text at all, and she couldn't believe it! I don't always pick up on those things!)

You're fine, thanks <3

I just am sensitive about innocuous and value-neutral things being read as having some DEEP MEANING. Like the thing about 'if you end a text with a period you're being rude.' Makes me batty.

Oh, yeah, I get that. I really am sorry for all the misunderstanding!

i just want to go delete all my bookmarks now lol

I really don't think you should have to do that--to me, the solution is for us to talk about how we use functions differently so that we don't make assumptions about motives. Not that you have to bear the brunt of that--if you want to delete them, that's of course up to you--I can understand if the whole thing is frustrating enough that you'd rather just opt out.